Does his argument hold? Because I had the same intuition as you, that a “random person raising from the dead” isn’t the comparison to make here, but I can’t fully articulate what the right comparison to make would be.
kremlin
Karma: 97
One of the things I got confused by in listening to this podcast was in the ‘two halves separated by descartes’. He said it I felt in a very off-hand way without even briefly reminding us what those two halves were. Is there a way I could get just a brief description of that?
Is it the separation between body and mind?
PS. I think you missed a couple words here:
The Romantics become anti-empiricists; the empiricists view the mind as a blank state that's impressed on by experience, the world is an empty canvas on which imagination expresses itself.I believe that the part beginning with “the world is an empty canvas...” should start with ”...while the Romantics think that...”
These sorts of things are definitely along the lines of the examples I had in mind as well. Thanks for the reply.
At about 20 minutes in, he says that as a cognitive scientist, the evidence that your mind and your consciousnessare completely dependent on and emergent from your brain is overwhelming. Now, I agree with this, and I can think of various examples that lead me to believe that that’s the occam’s razor position, but I’m curious if anybody can point me to any central source of resources for information to prove this. My basis for thinking this, as a layman, isn’t as rigorous or complete as I would like.
I also found hints of your steelmanning divination argument in here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fnkbdwckdfHS2H22Q/steelmanning-divination
He was making the case for a random walk through the space of things we’re not changing in order to help us find what we might be doing wrong.
There’s two or three terms he brings up again in this episode that he hasn’t used for a while, and I find the terms very ungooglable, and I can’t remember how he defined them earlier in the conversation—“exacted”, “exceptation” and maybe “exactation”.
Can anybody help me out here?
[edit] is he saying Exapting instead of Exacting? And by Excapting, is he meaning something like “the repurposing of existing tools for new purposes”?
love this response. thanks
Towards the end he’s talking about how these transformative experiences people have, these ‘quantum changes’, don’t give people any new knowledge, they give people more WISDOM. But his examples puzzled me.
He says, one person comes out of the transformatice experience and says “I knew that God exists”, and then another person comes out and says “I knew that there was no God.”
So my question is, what kind of valid “wisdom” can produce BOTH of those results? Is it just a type of wisdom that transforms the meaning each of these people assigns to the word God?
Around 53-55 minutes of the podcast if anyone wants to see what i’m referring to.
Thank you, I believe I understand
The principle I distilled from it is that The existence of meaning precedes the importance of truth (I’ll be happy to discuss that one).
Please. I’m not sure what it means, exactly, but I’m interested.
I’m commenting before finishing because I wanted this thought out of me:
I’m at the part where Kant is talking about the circular nature of biological feedback systems, and how when he traces out the logic it’s circular and therefor biology is, in some way, unsolvable.
It occurs to me that the feedback cycle of a tree (as the main example given) isn’t CIRCULAR, it’s a SPIRAL. In a circle, you go around and end up where you started. There’s no advancement, no change beyond your position on the circle. But a tree does advance. The roots gather the neutrients to grow leaves. The leaves harness energy to grow deeper roots, make the tree bigger, sprout new branches. The roots are now deeper than when they started, and keep getting deeper still, and the leaves are more plentiful than when they started, and keep getting more plentiful still. There’s a Cycle, sure, but not a Circle, it’s a spiral going ever upward.
And maybe, just maybe, Kang’s bid for the presidency appealing to the idea of ‘moving upward, twirling, twirling’ suddenly makes a lot of sense.
This is not related to the real purpose of all these talks, but I’ve wanted to run this idea by someone for a while:
Quantum Mechanics proves that, in a sense, the reality we know very much is a Plato’s Cave type situation. In other words, everything we experience is part of a shallower ‘shadow reality’ that is causally connected to, but distinct from or just a small part of, the true nature of reality.
If the deep nature of reality is that everything we think of as “a particle” exists in superposition, exists in this ever-evolving world of configuration-states, but the only thing we ever experience is one tiny part of that superposition, one tiny slice of configuration-space, then… we’re living in shadows of a sort.
Please tell me if that’s stupid.
Present struggles force you to highly value the present—things that make you struggle are going to make you find the present salient, and figure out how to improve the present quickly. There’s no room to think about the future when doing hard things in the present
I wonder if this is why I play hours of video games every day...
He mentions around 34 minutes in that faith has changed meaning, that it didn’t used to mean believing ridiculous things without evidence, that it meant more about knowing that you’re on course.
I wonder if there’s good evidence for that. He mentions a lot through this series so far that ancient mythology wasn’t about literally beleiving that stuff was actually happening. I find myself doubting that claim, and I’d like to see some evidence.
Would you still say it’s worth following along with this series?
Today I learned that the idea I’ve held for years I’m not alone in. I’ve believed in the sort of ‘every possible mathematical object’ approach—or alternatively, every possible input being run through every possible turing machine—for a long time. I don’t know if it has a name.
I was stumblin and I found this article, which I think graphically does a great job of making a similar point (although that point wasn’t its explicit intention).
All of the graphs except ‘tautology’ limit the number of worlds you could be in.
Variables in Arguments as a Source of Confusion
I guess I don’t imagine the idea always being used to that degree. I can imagine someone writing a new classic novel and they turn in their first draft of their next draft to their publisher, and their publisher says something like, “This sentence structure...studies have shown that it’s a bit too complicated for most readers to parse on the first read, and they can take 3 or 4 times reading it before they understand what you were trying to say. Try to simplify it or break it up into multiple sentences.”
I mean, that’s not the only example. That’s a rather mild example of how this sort of data would come into play, but I guess the examples I think of are less, ‘Shelf full of Twilight novels’ and more ‘Same variety of books we have now, written with structure that’s more in tune with how people read and think.’
I want a shelf full of Twilight as little as the next guy. But I also see that this sort of data can be used in helpful ways as well, not just used to produce the next mind-numbing teen fantasy.
13 years late here, but I think there’s a place for this distinction.
When someone says “I experienced such-and-such when I was near death, and that proves <something spiritual>”, there are 2 places for doubt that RobinZ is distinguishing.
That the best explanation for experiencing such-and-such is <something spiritual>
That the best explantaion for him remembering experiencing such-and-such is that he actually experienced such-and-such
RobinZ is distinguishing between those two avenues of doubt, whereas you’re apparently grouping them together.